Patchwork Dolls

by Ysabelle Cheung

What happens when dystopia feels like the next logical step?

ARC Review

Publisher: Blair Publishing
Release Date: February 10, 2026

Patchwork Dolls hits you with emotions and clever concepts and it does it sharply, and without ever flinching.

This is a debut story collection that plays with fabulism and tech, but it never goes off the rails. The future it shows us feels disturbingly close. These aren’t stories about distant dystopias or imagined extremes. They’re stories about what we’re already letting happen, just nudged a step further.

The title story, Patchwork Dolls made my skin crawl. It’s about women surgically selling their body parts, eyes, lips, entire faces, to wealthier clients. You could walk down the street and see someone wearing your mouth. Or your skin. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s really about class, about extraction, and about how far we’ll go to survive when the only thing we have left to sell is ourselves. You can absolutely see this happening. That's what makes it so hard to shake.

But not everything here is cold or clinical. Herbs was the most tender for me. An elderly widow starts getting visits from clones of her dead husband, at different ages, with different memories. There’s love in it, but also grief and loneliness that the tech can’t fix. The emotional unraveling here surprised me more than the sci-fi premise.

The writing is sharp, no dreamy fog or surreal gauze here. Cheung knows exactly what she's doing with tone. When something’s joyful, it’s joyful. When it’s bleak, it doesn’t soften the edges. And when the world feels “normal” for the characters, even if it wouldn’t be for us, it’s still delivered as normal. That’s what makes it land so hard.

Yes, there are cultural threads, some characters are clearly Asian or of Asian dissent, and racism, surveillance, and migration are part of the landscape. One story about an extraterrestrial mirroring what’s happening in U.S. immigration policy really was another stand out. But this isn’t identity lit. It’s sharper than that. It’s political, personal, and sometimes deeply weird in exactly the right amount.

What stayed with me most is that this world she’s building isn’t impossible. In a lot of ways, it already exists. These stories just tilt things a little further to the edge.

Thank you to Blair Publishing for the ARC and the possibility to get the early read.

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